“9-1-1” (or “911”) is an emergency telephone number for the North American Numbering Plan (NANP), one of eight N11 codes. In North American jurisdictions, special privacy legislation permits emergency operators to obtain a 9-1-1 caller's telephone number and location information. For wireline telephones, this information is gathered by mapping the calling phone number to an address in a database. This database function is known as location data source. The database is generally maintained by the local telephone company, under a contract with a Public Service Answering Point (PSAP). Each telephone company has standards for the formatting of the database.
A Public Safety Answering Point (PSAP), is a call center responsible for answering calls to an emergency telephone number for police, firefighting and ambulance services. Trained telephone operators may also be responsible for dispatching these emergency services. Most PSAPs are capable of caller location for landline calls, and many can handle mobile phone locations as well (sometimes referred to as phase II location), where the mobile phone company has a handset location system. As used herein, the term PSAP can alternatively refer to an Emergency Call Center (ECC) a term employed for VoIP based emergency call systems (Voice over Internet Protocol based emergency call systems).
Next Generation 9-1-1 (abbreviated “NG9-1-1”) refers to an initiative by the National Emergency Number Association (NENA) aimed at updating the 9-1-1 service infrastructure in the United States and Canada to improve public emergency communications services in a growingly wireless mobile society. In addition to calling 9-1-1 from a mobile phone, NG9-1-1 intends to enable the public to transmit text, images, video and data to the PSAP. The NG9-1-1 initiative also envisions additional types of emergency communications and data transfer. The NG9-1-1 infrastructure is intended to replace the current emergency network services over time.